Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Bill and George, happy at last

It's funny how the sight of Bill Clinton standing shoulder to shoulder with a Bush can still raise the blood pressure of some Democrats. You'd almost think the left hand of Jackson Stephens doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

I'm always up for a good Bush-bash, but if we're serious about exposing unpleasant truths we shouldn't balk when our own pleasant assumptions are exposed as little more than comfortable lies. And it seems to me that quite a few who study the high crimes of state do so not for the sake of justice, but rather to score points against political adversaries, as though politics still mattered.

Invariably, the conclusions then drawn are shallow and incomplete, and the systemic, bipartisan corruption again fails to receive the radical critique it deserves. (I find this sometimes with the 9/11 short-hand "Bush Knew," which backward-masks the mere political over the parapolitical.)

For an illustration of what I mean, spend some time digging through the Clinton-era archives of a number of conservative websites. You'll recover lots of good material on BCCI, the Inslaw affair, Mena drug trafficking and more. But almost invariably, it's all dumped at the feet of the Clinton White House, rather than the true perp which has cast a shadow over every White House since Harry Truman's: the perpetual, criminalized and increasingly privatized National Security State.

It was no surprise that, when Bush was selected President, most Republicans lost interest in the material, which again became the domain of "wild-eyed conspiracy theorists."

Likewise for Democrats. A number have no trouble entertaining the notion that 9/11 was an inside job, but they have persuaded themselves that Mena drug-trafficking was a right-wing lie (even though it was a Bush Iran/Contra operation for which Clinton provided cover, earning for Arkansas a tithe of laundered money), and that there was nothing suspicious about Vincent Foster's death (even though it stinks of PROMIS and BCCI).

I mentioned Jackson Stephens. Let's take a quick look.

The Arkansas billionaire was the principal domestic bagman for both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton.

The Kerry Committee identified Stephens as "possibly BCCI's principal US broker," having facilitated its first American acquisitions, the National Bank of Georgia and its former parent, Financial General Bankshares. Stephens in fact introduced the bank's Pakistani financier, Agha Hasan Abedi, to Bert Lance way back in 1975. And Stephens, along with Salem bin Laden via James Bath, became the financial saviours of George W Bush's troubled Harken Energy.

Stephens' name is linked to everything from BCCI to Mena to PROMIS to 9/11 (Daniel Hopsicker has found Stephens "active" in Venice Florida, where the 9/11 pilots trained and were sheltered.) Enough spirals to make even the late Mark Lombardi dizzy.

So, is Stephens a Republican or Democrat? What a silly question. His first allegiance is to the National Security Agency:

The chief government effort to spy on U.S. domestic banking transactions was directed by the electronic spy agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), working in connection with the Little Rock software firm Systematics. Systematics, half-owned by billionaire Jackson Stephens (of Stephens Inc. fame), has been a major supplier of software for back office clearing and wire transfers. It was Stephens' attempt to get Systematics the job of handling the data processing for the Washington-D.C. bank First American that led to the BCCI takeover of that institution. Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster represented Systematics in that endeavor, and later Foster became an overseer of the NSA project with respect to Systematics.

Working together, the NSA and Jackson Stephens' Systematics developed security holes in much of the banking software Systematics sold. Now we face a crisis in banking and financial institution security, according to John Deutch, Director of the CIA. "One obstacle is that banks and other private institutions have been reluctant to divulge any evidence of computer intrusions for fear that it will leak and erode the confidence of their customers. Deutch said 'the situation is improving' but that more cooperation was needed from major corporations, and said the CIA remains willing to share information with such firms about the risks they might face."What Deutch failed to mention was that this "banking crisis" in large part was itself created by one of the U.S. intelligence agencies--the NSA in cahoots with Stephens' software firm Systematics.

And what about Mena? If the drug trafficking really happened on Clinton's watch as Governor, some Democrats argue, then why didn't Kenneth Starr go after it?

It may have something to do with what Starr was doing in 1982: aiding Attorney General William French Smith excise drug trafficking from a long list of crimes the CIA was legally bound to report if Agency operatives were found to be perpetrating them. This laid a premeditated cover for Iran/Contra's guns for drugs, of which Mena was a critical hub.

This explains the dichotomy between Starr's handling of the Foster murder and the Arkansas Horrors versus his handling of the Monica Lewinsky/ perjury issue. Starr isn't protecting Bill Clinton per se, he is protecting the CIA.... Starr is not afraid to press on the Monica Lewinsky issue because that scandal does not risk exposure of the CIA's Iran-Contra smuggling. Starr...is connected to the CIA drug cartel. He helped write their "license to smuggle". This is why Starr covered up Foster's murder, to protect that operation. This is not a Republican scandal. This is not a Democratic scandal. This is a CIA drug scandal. And both parties are dirty as hell.

So enough of gaming left or right "conspiracy theories." They're either right or wrong. Enough, even, of politics. The truth isn't out there, it's down there: below the surface of things. And as usual, that's where things get really stinky.

By the way, heads up: Popular Mechanics is coming out swinging at some of the more ridiculous strawmen of 9/11 research with its March 2005 cover story. The magazine chooses 16 mostly farcical claims of physical evidence to demolish, pinata-like - "pods"; "no windows on Flight 175"; "hole too small for a 757" - and then presumes to have vindicated the official story. Go here to read Jim Hoffman's terrific response.

1419 Comments:

Absolutely. About a year ago, as I was transitioning into a "conspiracy buff", I had a choice to make. I could either be dishonest and be a partisan conspiracy buff, or be honest and forgo any illusions about Clinton and be a non-partisan conspiracy buff. I chose the latter. You're totally right about the Clinton scandals, which sadly is one reason so many Democrats won't go near 9/11, because the Republicans played up the Clinton conspiracies to a farcical degree. I've thought for some time, if Bush ever gets in trouble (not too likely with the media and the US govenrment in his sway), it won't be for the really serious stuff that touches on the national Security state, such as 9/11. Rather it will be for some foolishness that touches peripherally upon some far deeper matter.

Your point was driven home to me forcefully while watching the BBC "Power of Nightmares" series, when David Brock specifically claims that Mena was a made-up scandal by the right-wing noise machine. I had suspected there was something not quite right about how "al-Qaeda" was being presented in that series, and until that point I couldn't quite place it. But that's it, isn't it? The "drug war" is completely edited out of the picture.

The partisanship runs pretty deep--you can read conspiracy theorists who will say Hamas is an Israeli asset, then turn around and complain that Sami Al-Arian is being held for his "political views". Uh...no. More likely the guy's being held incommunicado because of what he knows about how terrorism really works.

The Intermountain Regional Airport at Mena first came to national attention following the crash of a cargo plane in the jungles of Nicaragua. The sole survivor of the crash, Eugene Hassenfuss, confessed to being part of an illegal operation to arm and resupply the Contra forces staged out of the Mena airport, and the scandal known as Iran-Contra erupted across the headlines of the world.

The specific aircraft which crashed in Nicaragua had, during the Vietnam war, belonged to Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that had flown guns to the Laotian Meo in Long Tien, while bringing heroin back. Following the end of the Vietnam war, the aircraft was purchased by legendary drug smuggler Barry Seal, who renamed it the "Fat Lady" and based it at the Mena airport. Following Seal's murder (an obvious setup by the court system), the plane was used in the gun running operation to Nicaragua, ending with the crash.

Robert Maxwell was a British (some say east european, his origins are sketchy) publishing tycoon who jumped, slipped, or was thrown off his yacht in 1991 and drowned. He was a Mossad agent during the 1980s and was buried with top honors in Israel as if, some say, he were the head of Israeli intelligence. The scoundrel that he was is indicated by: when his media empire got into trouble he began looting the pension funds of thousands of employees to keep his lavish style.

Bill Hamilton, co-founder of Inslaw Inc., alleges the U.S. government stole Promis from him, and then - along with the Israelis - sold pirated versions to intelligence agencies around the world. In 82-83 Inslaw had two limited contracts to provide Promis to the Justice Dept, neither application, it seems, had anything to do with tracking terrorist activities.

In the 1980s Earl Brian made an attempt to buy out Inslaw, the money was to be provided through the investment banking firm of Allen & Co. --- half of this money was to come from Robert Maxwell, while the other half was to come from Jackson Stephens.

Hamilton's suits charge that the software was pirated, modified it for intelligence and financial uses. It was then sold to many governments including Israel, Canada, UK, Germany to name some and made lots of money. The part of interest to us is that after the installation of a "back door" into the program, Israel, using Robert Maxwell, sold the software to "unfriendly" nations such as the USSR and then secretly retrieved financial intelligence data.

I am familiar with many of the items you've mentioned (Inslaw, Iran-Contra, et al) but I'm having trouble with the big picture - if Mr. Clinton was so deeply in bed with the bushies & their friends, why did he have such a rough time w/bogus investigations & eventual impeachment? Are there "wheels within wheels" going on here or was it just a big media circus designed to distarct the masses? What am I missing here?& thanx for blogging...

There's a level of nuance here that must be appreciated. The PTB do not need to blackmail people that are already fully on board their various agendas. They need to blackmail people that OPPOSE one or another of their agendas (even if they are generally supportive of the main agenda items).

Clinton proved himself enough of a pain to the PTB in Arkansas (presumably the so-called 'bond daddies' and the Ozark Dixie-Mafia, whatever term is used for that long-standing criminal part of the power structure there) that they dumped him after his first 2-year term in office as governor.

After that, upon regaining office (and maybe as a condition for regaining it) Clinton became more compliant with the larger business interests' agenda there, and Hillary moderated her image somewhat, adding Clinton to her prior maintained original name of Hillary Rodham.

Still, the supposed money man for Clinton, Jackson Stephens (and he had been a funding source for Clinton, not denying that) was found funding most of, if not all, Clinton's gubernatorial opponents, just as supposed Clinton patron Tyson Foods also lined up to oppose him in various governor's races.

Linda Thompson, a prominent person in the national militia movement, and no apologist for Clinton, suggested that the longish string of dead people associated with Clinton were actually warnings to him and a method of trying to keep him under control.

Close to the peak of the impeachment imbroglio, the CIA Inspector General's report about agency involvement with Contra/cocaine was put out, and some have theorized this was Clinton's shot across the bow of his enemies to back off. While perhaps a limited hangout maneuver, and far from a complete account, the nonetheless not insubstantial admissions let slip in that report make little sense from an agency or PTB standpoint. Whatever was going on in Arkansas, the key to the Mena and other goings-on wasn't in Little Rock, but in DC, and Langley, VA.

When one paints with an overbroad brush, a lot of important detail gets washed out. When Noam Chomsky refuses to consider JFK anything more than a tool of his overclass pedigree, for example, he overlooks that Kennedy WAS taking on the Mafia, big oil (threatening their oil depletion allowance), big steel (threatening anti-trust actions in jawboning back their coordinated price increases), AND the military-industrial complex, by refusing to initiate US combat operations (less than 20 US dead in Vietnam as of his death). Not to mention taking on Israel and the Zionists, as he adamantly opposed their obtaining nuclear weapons, which then-Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion said was a life and death issue for Israel.

The problem with conspiracy theorizing is that a given set of facts can bear any number of explanatory narratives, and it is typical when hearing of them from a given source to accept the framing that the source provides as to their meaning. But the clever use of some truth in the service of disinformation is one of the most powerful methods of psy-ops. The best lies are those that contain a considerable amount of truth.

Since we must presume we are dealing with experts at that art, honed in decades of experience, it becomes difficult indeed to try to discern the true lay of the land beneath the layers of camouflage deliberately set out to distract anyone looking for the truth.

Web Hubbell's book, Friends in High Places, explained that the first thing Clinton had him do was try to get the low-down on a) UFOs, and b) the Kennedy assassination. The latter was also something that Nixon repeatedly tried to find out about.

Presidents seem to be temporary hired hands, rather than key actor insiders. When they threaten the PTB, either as opponents of the agenda, or as dissidents within the agenda, the limits of their power, and their vulnerability, is made clear to them.

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